134811-congrats-wildstar
Content ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- People keep bringing up WoW..... Okay, we'll do a proper comparison shall we. WoW launched in 2004. At that time MMO's were still a pretty niche genre, we didn't have millions of players then. At most we had a few hundred thousand. When WoW launched there hadn't been many MMO's before it and a lot of developers were new to it, it was a learning curve for devs and players alike. It took WoW until Wrath to hit 12 million players but it's always had a steady stream of people joining and leaving, it has never entered dire straits. Wildstar launched in a time when the market is oversaturated with MMO's. Players have, literally, thousands of MMo's to choose from and all those MMO's are trying to bring in players. Not only is the competition for players much greater now but Wildstar has already suffered once. It didn't do amazingly well to start with and population drops emptied quite a few servers. I know, I was on one of them. The subscription model was no longer viable. Remember also that during the first few months a lot of people were claiming it would go free to play. I was one of the folk that defended Wildstar and said it never would. This is it's second chance. A second chance it desperately needs to get right. Carbine needs to convince players to play their game, stay and hand over some of that money they need. Not only do they need to convince players to come and try their game they are also in competition with every single MMO available for those players. We all know how fickle some people are. These issues will have already lost them players. They are players that would have left anyway but they may have spent some money, now they won't. Wildstar does not have a glowing reputation. People would wait for a game that had a sterling reputation but this has already struggled and it's not convincing people that it's worth sticking around for now. I get that some people love the game and will defend it, I did the exact same thing last year, but it won't make things any better. People have issues and those issues need fixing. It's safe to say that most of us want the game to do well but telling people that every MMO ever created has had problems doesn't change the fact that this MMO needed the "relaunch" to go smoothly. This isn't a game with millions of people behind it, it's a game fighting for survival. Edited October 1, 2015 by Gomly | |} ---- ---- ---- Not to unduly defend W* when it has been a decidedly tumultuous relaunch, but I have to pick a few nits with your points. 1. You claim WoW's population steadily increased. Fine, but the key word is steady. Here, we have a situation where the population went from, maybe, a few thousand to several tens of thousands or more all at once. It's a lot easier to deal with a steady increase you can somewhat anticipate. Also, you've left out the bit where the WoW servers at launch didn't work for the first two months. I understand that this is a RElaunch, but many of the problems today are caused by the same kind of massive influx you see at regular launches. 2. People are fickle, but Wildstar isn't going to see all of it's prospective new clients in the first day or two. Many, yes, and many won't come back, but there will be plenty still who'll jump in after a week or a month when word of mouth/media/advertising *hint hint* spread. | |} ---- The difference is, WoW at WoD launch was over 10 million people hitting their login servers. Wildstar at launch didn't have that and you can bet they don't have even half of that now. Wildstar also has much newer server tech than WoW has running on it's 10 year old servers. Or you could go with, Wildstar's f2p transition was/is based out of necessity. WoW can botch a launch so bad that 3 million players quit week 1 and they will still be sitting in a great spot. Wildstar's botch launch could very well kill any chance the game has left. As someone who has defended Carbine for over a year, you can only do so much before they have to take responsibility. I along with many others left the game for various reasons. One of which was the fact that the place was pretty vacant. Guilds died off due to no recruits. Q times grew more and more every day. All signs of just general lack of people. So they go with f2p. Great. And now they are botching that too. You would think they would learn from the hell that was the original launch but nope still failing the server tech. This is actually worse than launch imo. Because with launch once you were in, the game ran perfect. Now, you can get in but the lag is total shit, most people can't even make characters to play, and when you finally do make a character you are more likely to be dc'd before you even get in forcing you to redo the creation. TL;DR Don't be that guy. Carbine is failing pretty hardcore when they knew up front exactly what would happen and did nothing to prep for it. Instead of being proactive they are being reactive and it will cost them (and us) thousands of players. Saying it's normal on a relaunch of a game that failed it's first launch helps no one. | |} ----